Tamar Novick explores the use of bodily waste in scientific practice, considering when worthless matter becomes valuable and how this fosters new relationships between distant places, institutions, people, and animals.

In his research project, historian of science Lino Camprubí analyzes how anti-submarine surveillance reunited geopolitics and ocean science during the Cold War, enabling new global visions of the Mediterranean Sea.

Historian of science Jenny Bangham argues that many of the questions and techniques of contemporary human genetics were first established between 1920 and 1960, when the only human characters with clear-cut inheritance were blood groups.

The Max Planck Research Group Twentieth Century Histories of Knowledge about Human Variation, directed by Veronika Lipphardt, has invited Katrin von Lehmann as an artist-in-residence to contemplate the role of visualizations in the study of human variation.

Historian of science Matteo Valleriani has published a new edition of Nova scientia by the mathematician Nicolò Tartaglia that sheds new light on the emergence of ballistics as consequence of technological innovations around 1500.

A new working group is challenging the taken-for-granted nature of endangerment in contemporary discourse by placing it in conceptual and historical perspective and exploring the situated, culturally and historically specific character of the imperative to preserve nature and culture.

Published in Edition Open Access, a new volume by Jürgen Renn and Peter Damerow sheds fresh light on a major Renaissance controversy: through the equilibrium controversy, key aspects of mechanical knowledge, such as the positional effect of weight or force, were redefined and laid the foundation for concepts in modern physics.

By developing new methods to organize and analyze historical data, in particular the geographical analytical tool “map Places In Time” (mapPIT), Dagmar Schäfer and Falk-Juri Knauft examine and write about how the design and perception of space have changed historically and what impact this change has had on scientific and technical thought.

In her new project, Christine von Oertzen explores why members of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in the United States came to focus in the 1880s on the early development of infants and toddlers.

Lorraine Daston, director of the MPIWG, has coedited a book on the histories of scientific observation from the fifth to the late twentieth century which presents studies from the working group “Scientific Observation.”

Nicolas Langlitz’s anthropological investigation of brain research and philosophy in the sleep laboratory shows how philosophical questions that scholars have wrestled with for centuries are addressed in novel ways through laboratory experiments.

By studying the German physiologist and psychologist Hugo Münsterberg’s late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century laboratories in Freiburg and at Harvard University, Henning Schmidgen shows how new instruments encourage the emergence of new scientific facts.